Aufwader is named after the small and mythical shore-dwelling creatures of the Whitby Witches trilogy, and has been an avid Robin Jarvis fan for longer than is quite respectable. After many years of RJ-related blogging, Aufwader is now enjoying a quiet retirement, punctuated by annual hampers of crispy mouse ears and bone-marrow jelly delivered from goodness knows where.
Matt grew up in Sydney, Australia, the oldest of five in a homeschooling family. He stumbled across the Deptford Mice trilogy when he was in his early teens, and it quickly became one of his favourite book series of all time. (His siblings all tell tales of how they were traumatised by hearing him read the Mice books out loud to them.) From then on, it became his habit to check out the J row in the young adult / children’s section of any bookstore that he was in, checking to see whether Robin Jarvis had written a new book.
Life took him down a path of studying mathematics and statistics at university, because he thought those would be a lot more lucrative than anything like, say, an Arts degree. Ironically, he switched careers to follow his passion and work in the classical music industry, and has been there ever since.
Now 38, his interests include music, movies, books (especially the ones he loved as a kid!), theology, playing with his three children, and exercising outdoors in the gloriously warm Australian mornings. In 2014, like Aufwader, he discovered that Robin Jarvis had a Twitter, and he feels he’s been interrupting Robin’s writing on there ever since…
You can read Matt’s musings on all sorts of stuff at his blog: including his former blogging projects: the One-Year War and Peace, the And Then There Were None Read-Along, and the Mahler Symphonies Guided Tour. For his thoughts on the future of classical music, check out futureclassical.com.
Myth & Sacrifice 